Alvarez talks about how design is changing, how the approach to design at Microsoft is changing, and user research misperceptions and challenges. She also offers advice to those who are insisting all designers should code.

Here are a few highlights from our chat:

Steve Jobs has said that, “Design is not how it looks, it’s how it works.” I would go one step further and say, “Design is how you work.” When you’re using something, how do you feel … How are you feeling more capable — do you feel smarter? Do you feel stronger? Do you feel stupider? Design is how you feel when you are using things or having experiences.

The ‘butt-brush’ effect comes from the wonderful Paco Underhill book Why We Buy. … Specifically, the butt-brush phenomenon is people looking at products that they really wanted to buy, but the store layout made it so people were bumping into them. That was such a strong push to get them to abandon what they were doing … that they’d just get up and walk away. He theorized about people feeling vulnerable, and undoubtedly there’s some sort of evolutionary thing about woolly mammoths sneaking up on us or something. I think it’s just, on a more base level, people feel clumsy. They feel fat, they feel clumsy and awkward, and we don’t like that at all.

Every designer out there thinks Craigslist is horrible and ugly. It is horribly ugly. [But] if you get on Craigslist and you find an apartment in your new city, you just felt smart. You just felt awesome. That is great design.

Everyone should be a designer and everyone should write code: both of those are wrong in my opinion.

M​ary Treseler is Vice President, Content Strategy at O’Reilly Media, ​where she leads an editorial team that covers a wide range of topics from Devops to design. Mary is chair of the Velocity Conference. She has been working on technical content for 25 years, acquiring and developing content in areas such as programming, software engineering, and product design. A Boston native, Mary lives​ oceanside​ ​in Padanaram, MA.